Robust innovation ecosystems and related entrepreneurship ecosystems at universities are a mix of systematic and organic initiatives from the administration, faculty, students, private sector and government. This dynamism results in a variety of initiatives - many of which are continually evolving and sometimes overlapping. Consequently, healthy university ecosystems can be confusing - especially to new students and non-university people.

This entrepreneurship ecosystem web directory (EEWD) helps minimize confusion by providing a single source for all the entrepreneurship-related programs, events and resources that are available to the university community. The EEWD also helps the Cal community and others navigate the University's vast, dynamic entrepreneurship ecosystem.

What is an informative way to visually convey a university's entrepreneurship ecosystem (EE)? Robust university EEs are a mix of systematic and organic initiatives, so they aren't conducive to visual representation by an org chart or other hierarchical graphic. Likewise, the entrepreneurship process has multiple paths as well as many entry and exit points. So it's misleading to visually characterize a healthy EE as a formulaic set of activities on a timeline. Finally, many EE resources aren't associated with a physical location, so it doesn't work to use a map of the university to visually navigate the EE.

Healthy university EEs can be segmented into five areas. The five areas don't have a strict sequential or hierarchical relationship to each other, except that the research and education area is fundamental to the university. So an effective way to represent the EE is via a 5-sided pyramid (tetrahedron) with the base plane representing the research and education area. However, a tetrahedron is difficult to represent on a web page. So the pyramid was flattened into a pentagon, and the research and education area is on the top triangle of the 5-sided polygon. A circle is centered inside the pentagon to convey that a robust university EE doesn't end at the borders of the campus. In a future release of the EEWD, the pentagon will have live links.